What I Earned Reselling Clothes for One Year on Depop, Poshmark, Mercari, and Vinted
I’m very motivated to resell my clothes, but it’s not the money that keeps me going
Haley, dressed in one of her cottage core outfits, gesturing towards the incredible collection of vintage and handmade dresses in her closet.
Haley Marie
Instagram | YouTube | Depop | Vinted | Poshmark | Mercari
Haley here, with a big report on my earnings from a year reselling clothes on Poshmark, Mecari, Depop, and Vinted. The stats reported below represent 12 months of sales from Dec. 1, 2020 through Nov. 30, 2021.
Before I reveal how much money I made, let's talk about my biggest goal around reselling: keeping clothes out of the landfill. I only resell clothes that I buy for myself as part of my process of cleaning out my closet. Every few months, I go through my wardrobe and identify items to resell. I’ll list these items on the resale apps for one year. After that period, I’ll take whatever hasn’t sold to Buffalo Exchange (a consignment chain). Next, everything that Buffalo Exchange doesn’t take gets posted on my Facebook Buy Nothing page. Finally, as a last resort, anything that isn’t claimed via Facebook goes to Goodwill as a donation.
I sold a total of 171 items in 2021. In December 2020, when I decided to start tracking my process, I had earmarked 144 items that I planned to clear out of my closet if I couldn’t sell them online within the next 12 months. By the end of November 2021, I had sold 100 of these earmarked items on the resale apps. Out of the remaining 44 pieces, Buffalo Exchange took 10 items, my local Buy Nothing group took 22, and I ended up donating 12 items to Goodwill.
According to the Council for Textile Recycling,* only 10 to 20% of the clothes dropped off at charity thrift shops are resold directly to customers. The rest is bought by independent textile processing companies. Of this, 5% (the soiled and mildewed) goes directly to the landfill, 20% is shredded to make insulation and filling, 30% is cut into industrial rags, and 45% is sorted by quality and exported to foreign markets (African countries get the lowest quality of the lot).
The Kantamanto Market in Accra, Ghana, receives 15 million garments a week, which are purchased sight unseen in bales by local resellers; 40% of what they buy (6.4 million garments a week) is unsellable and ends up in massive trash piles, incinerated, or swept into gutters and eventually out to sea. The increasingly poor quality of used clothing and the staggering volume that we export to African countries has turned the resale business in Accra into a financial gamble and an environmental catastrophe.
Of the 12 items I brought to Goodwill, my conservative estimate is that one garment (10% of the total) was actually sold to a local customer and that the remaining 11 items were either incinerated, shredded/repurposed, exported, or ended up in a landfill. If I had taken all 144 items directly to Goodwill, I can assume that about 130 of them would have ended up in a textile processing center and likely destined for export (i.e. inevitably becoming someone else’s problem).
As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that I should have turned those last 12 items into rags for cleaning, which I will do next time. While I am pleased that I rehomed most of my clothes domestically, there are downsides. I can’t ignore the carbon footprint generated by shipping packages all over the country. I was only able to send about 50% of my sold items in reused packaging, which means I added packaging waste as well.
Reselling also takes a lot more time than one would generally realize. I don’t have a final tally of the hours spent listing, packaging, and shipping the items that I sold. I only started recording my time in the later months of the experiment and was not always accurate. I can safely estimate that I spent at least 160 hours in one year reselling my clothes, and I am sure I spent much more time than that. This has made me realize how important it is to be intentional about what I put in my wardrobe, since I will spend at least one hour per item trying to get rid of it sustainably.
Let's hop into a breakdown of my sales on each app. I’m only reporting earnings that were released from Dec. 1, 2020 through Nov. 30, 2021. When a buyer purchases something on Poshmark, Mercari, or Vinted, these companies don’t pay the seller until the buyer has received the item and approved it. I don’t count my earnings until the money is in my pocket. Whenever I pay shipping for an item, I add this to the platform fees that I subtract from my profits. Platforms often pressure sellers to offer “free” shipping, but shipping is never free; it is a vendor expense.
Poshmark
Total earnings: $874.09
Number of items sold: 66
Average earnings per item: $13.24
Poshmark fees total: $293.91
Average Poshmark fees per item: $4.45
Percentage of fees taken: 26%
Poshmark was the app I got top sales from in terms of amount of money made and number of items sold. I was surprised to learn that of all the apps I use (excluding Vinted) Poshmark charges the lowest seller fees (20% of your earnings). I frequently opted to split shipping costs with the buyer — essentially offering a shipping discount to incentivize purchases — which raised the percentage of fees taken from my sales to 26%. Depop and Mercari claim to take 10% of your sales in fees. However, by the time you pay transaction and shipping fees, their cut is about the same as Poshmark. I think my sales on this app were the highest because I am an established seller on this platform (I’ve been a Poshmark seller since 2014) and I have the biggest following here. Overall, Poshmark is a great app once you figure out that you don’t need to be as social on it as they try to convince you to be. I just share my listings once a day and send offers once a week to incentivize sales and keep my listings relevant.
Mercari
Total earnings: $532.96
Number of items sold: 56
Average earnings per item: $9.52
Mercari fees total: $209.31
Average Mercari fees per item: $3.73
Percentage of fees taken: 28%
I made my second highest sales on Mercari, but I also got the least amount of money per item on this platform. I really like Mercari’s selling tools. They allow you to set your price to autodrop, which helps keep your listings at the top of search. I determine the lowest price that I’m willing to charge per item and the app will incrementally apply a discount until it hits the bottom price. Then I relist the item and start the cycle again. I spend the least amount of time on the app to keep my listings relevant. My seller’s fee on Mercari is high (28%) because I offered free shipping for my first three months on the app (Mercari encourages sellers to offer free shipping by suggesting that it will make things sell faster). If I remove the amount that I paid for shipping, Mercari took 17% of my sales in platform fees. I have stopped offering free shipping and I haven’t seen sales slow down as a result, so I expect my fees to be lower on this app going forward.
Depop
Total earnings: $344.10
Average earnings per item: $17.20
Number of items sold: 20
Depop fees total: $202.18
Average Depop fees per item: $10.11
Percentage of fees taken: 38%
Depop is where I got the most money per item, which makes sense to me since Depop shoppers are more interested in finding unique clothing than they are in getting the hottest deal. Depop is also fairly low maintenance; I just need to resave my listing once a week to bump them up in the search algorithm. Both of these factors made selling on Depop worthwhile for me even though I sold the lowest number of items here and was charged the highest fees.
My seller’s fees on Depop are high because I offered free shipping on this app. Similar to Mercari, Depop suggests that you’re more likely to sell an item if you offer free shipping, a claim that I’m no longer buying into. Starting in 2022, I stopped offering free shipping on Depop because I don’t want to contribute to the idea that shipping is free. Also Depop doesn’t show how much shipping will cost when customers click on an item. The only benefit that sellers get from offering free shipping is if someone searches for items “only with free shipping.”
This brings me to my other beef with Depop: It is by far the least transparent of all the apps. In addition to not showing customers the shipping price until an item is in their carts, Depop doesn’t tell sellers how much profit they’ll make when selling an item. I once ended up paying a customer to take my item because the fees (including shipping) were $4 higher than the final retail price. All the other apps make it clear how much you will earn per sale and they won’t allow you to sell an item at a negative number. Depop’s lack of transparency is extra egregious because their target audience is teenagers. These aren’t necessarily people who have been reselling for years and fully understand how fee structures work.
Depop also lacks meaningful seller tools like offers, price drops, and vacation mode. In March 2022, they finally enabled customers to make offers to sellers, but there is no way for me as a seller to make an offer to a buyer. These things could change as Etsy has acquired Depop and I suspect they will add better seller’s tools (like those mentioned above).
Vinted
Total earnings: $437.90
Number of items sold: 29
Average earnings per item: $15.10
Vinted fees total: $0
Average Vinted fees per item: $0
Percentage of fees taken: 0%
My sales on Vinted were actually pretty decent considering that this app has the smallest audience of the four. I also got a nice return per item here. Vinted is hands down my favorite app for selling. I like that they charge their platform fee to the buyer (by adding 10% to the retail price) and there is no free shipping option.
One flaw on Vinted is you have to pay a fee to bump an item up in search which costs money upfront and does not guarantee that the item will sell (you could pay for the bump several times, not sell anything, and end up in the red). I work around this by relisting my items at least once every other month to keep them relevant. Vinted makes you wait a few days in between deleting the old listing and relisting, probably to stop people from relisting and instead pay for the search bump, which is really annoying. The other thing I dislike about Vinted is they occasionally flag and remove my listings for using stock images. I always use my own well lit, modeled photos that are definitely not stock! Whatever algorithm they use to detect stock images is really frustrating.
The last flaw about Vinted is it can be a really glitchy app to use. When I make an offer to a buyer it sometimes sends them the offer twice. The bundling process is also super glitch-prone and it causes a lot of customers to drop off before the sale is completed. This is always a bummer to the seller because bundling is a decent amount of work.
Grand Total
Total earnings: $2,189.05
Number of items sold: 171
Average earnings per item: $12.80
Total fees: $704.50
Average fees per item: $4.11
Average percentage of fees taken: 25%
Map of where items were shipped across the United States
Honestly if someone asked me to pick a favorite/top resale app recommendation, I would tell them to just list on all. The most time-consuming process of selling online is taking photos, measurements, and writing descriptions. Cross-platform listing is not much of a time suck for me: Once I have the photos taken and descriptions written, I can put on a podcast and zone out a bit while copying and pasting across platforms.
That said, if I had to pick one, my choice would depend on a more specific follow-up question. If the question were, “Which app aligns best with your values?” I would say Vinted. I think their transparency is super cool and I enjoy the buyers I interact with on that platform. If the question were, “Which is your favorite as a reseller with the goal of making money and moving product?” It would be Mercari, hands down. Mercari takes the least amount of time and doesn’t have the multi-level marketing vibes of Poshmark. While my sales are lower on Mercari, I think it’s a good option for a beginner or for someone who doesn’t want to actively monitor their listings
Reselling clothing is a lot of effort, but I think it is worth it for many reasons. While I’m not turning a profit from my sales, I am recouping at least some of the money I’ve spent on clothes. I set aside that cash for unexpected expenses like car repairs or vet bills, which helps reduce strain on my budget. I also enjoy the challenge of learning how to use the resale platforms efficiently to make the most amount of money for the least amount of effort. I enjoy the rush of a sale and find it similar to online shopping, but without the environmental and financial cost of buying something new. Another substantial benefit of reselling is that I get to interact with people from all over the country. I’m truly glad to know that most of my clothing is getting a second life in a new city and not destined to burden another country’s economy and environment. Reselling has also made me much more intentional in what I buy. I mostly shop secondhand, but when I do buy new garments, I make sure they are high enough quality to resell down the road.
I would encourage everyone to try reselling online or working with a local consignment shop if you don’t want to put the effort in yourself. You can also be less intense about it than I am. I’m always trying to get the best price that I can for my items, but if you really want to move something along you can list it super low. A good piece will most likely sell without much effort and bring someone joy who might not otherwise be able to afford it
Fun facts:
Cheapest thing I sold: $5 bundle including bronze dangly earrings and blue circle earrings ($2.50 each)
Most expensive things I sold: $80 tie between Blackmilk Sunny Days Dress and Blackmilk Fox Overalls
Most surprising item that sold: yellow bloomer things
Thing I most regret selling: A 1960’s Girl scout uniform.
Editor’s Notes:
*The data quoted in this piece comes from the Council for Textile Recycling (CTR), a non-profit organization that disseminates information provided by SMART (the trade association for textile recyclers) and companies like Trans-Americas Textile Recycling, Inc. (whose owner, Jack Stubin, is president of the CTR’s board).
In researching what happens to our clothes after they are donated to Goodwill and similar charities, we found these same industry figures resurfacing in every source (see: Huffington Post, Newsweek, NPR). We weren’t able to independently verify what percentage of donated clothing is exported abroad, repurposed, incinerated, or landfilled. This leaves us wondering about the accuracy of the CTR’s information, since it is provided by an industry with an economic interest in making consumers feel positive about donating lots (and lots) of clothing.
Last updated: May 12, 2022
Editor & Copywriter: Karrie Witkin | Designer & Illustrator: Haley Burson | Social Media Strategist: Elise Nye | Copy Editor: Katie Frankowicz
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